Mary Holland Jandebeur

? - April 15, 2021

LHS '66

Kathy Harris Jones, LHS '66 reported "It’s with a sad heart that I share the news that Mary Holland Jandebeur died April 15, 2021.  Her husband (Tom) said that she passed away 7 months after being diagnosed with ALS.   He said very few people knew because that was the way Mary wanted it.  She did not want an obituary or a service and he abided by her wishes.

Other Classmates We Have Just Found Out About

In working with the reunion committee to try to find lost classmates to notify about the upcoming reunion, Susan Simms has discovered the following classmates' passings have never been announced in Lee's Traveller.  We will continue to make these announcements as we receive them. 

Jane Anne Cope

February 26, 1947 - August 21, 2014

LHS '65

Jane was born on February 26, 1947, and passed away on Thursday, August 21, 2014. Jane was a resident of Gainesville, Texas, at the time of passing.

Devenia Jean Stiles

November 25, 1946 - April 17, 2019

LHS '65

Traveling friends, Val Seaquist and Rainer Klauss.

How I Spent My 2019 Christmas Vacation

Rainer Klauss

LHS '64

Gudrun and I are not sure of the exact sequence of events that led me to sign up for the OLLI (Osher Lifelong Learning Institute) Christmas Markets tour on the Danube scheduled for December 2019. It happened quickly, though, and something like this:  I probably heard about the trip during the facilitator’s announcements preceding an OLLI class at UAH in the fall of 2018 and grabbed a brochure at the office later on.  Then I learned that my good friend, Val Seaquist, was going. Gudrun and I discussed the trip. Although she didn’t want to go—having experienced the delights of German Christmas markets in her youth—she urged me to look into it for myself. I had her blessing. I didn’t need further encouragement. Five minutes later I was speaking to a Grand Circle Cruise Line contact person and found out the cost of the festive river cruise--about $4400 because I was traveling as a single passenger. That included airfare and trip cancellation insurance, a necessity for any adventure that lay that far ahead. Then the agent sank the hook: Paying the full amount within a month chopped off nearly a quarter of the total cost. Gudrun and I talked further about my findings, and I got the green light to proceed. About half an hour later I had a claim to a private stateroom on the Cantata deck of the M/S River Adagio. The two musical references boded well for the trip, I thought. All I had to do was wait for a year to roll by.

Several weeks before we were to leave, I received an email from Michal Nejeschleba. He introduced himself, passed along some more information about the trip, and informed me that he was the GCCL Program Director for the Blue Team of the Adagio passengers. That included all of the UAH OLLI tourists. The other divisions were Red, Yellow, and Green. 

  On the morning of December 2, 2019, Val and her husband, Jim (who wasn’t going on the trip), stopped by in Madison to pick me up for our flight to Atlanta. Check-in and TSA clearance went quickly. We had arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare before the flight and had the gate seating all to ourselves. Soon Marilyn Szecholda, one of our OLLI friends and a fellow tour member joined us. We chatted about the upcoming experience and other matters. The long wait made me restless, and I walked around the concourse several times. As good luck apparel for the flight, I had chosen to wear the Bayern Munich soccer team sweatshirt I had bought in Munich in 1998. Noticing the team’s bold emblem, two guys, a German and a Brit, stopped me for separate conversations about the German professional powerhouse. 

As the departure day for the Danube adventure drew near, I often wondered how this elderly body, that was twenty-one years older than the last time I flew across the Atlantic in 1998, would handle the jet lag and the stresses and strains of the full journey. 

  I didn’t sleep at all during the 8-hour flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam. During this long period of suspended animation, I watched the little airplane (modeling a large Airbus 330-300) head eastward at 35, 000 feet—7 hours to go, 6 hours to go, 5…. To distract myself from the seatback screen’s graphic reminder of Zeno’s arrow paradox, I occasionally glanced at the movies that others around me were watching: West Side Story, HBO’s harrowing series, Chernobyl, and a Bruce Springsteen concert.  I thought about an OLLI class on famous memoirs I was going to teach.  The beginning of the adventure excited me so much that I felt little tiredness. 

Our arrival at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam started us on a frantic scramble for the next flight. We landed at an airport whose layout was foreign to us, of course. Even after we learned which gate our Nuremberg flight departed from, we had no clear indication of how to get there. Schiphol is full of appealing shopping and eating areas, but Val, Marilyn, and I had no time to appreciate those features as we dashed through the crowded concourses. Helpful information and people were hard to find. We heard one vague and wacky-seeming hint: “Turn right at the sunglasses store.”  What!? We did so, and that herded us into the jam-packed Passport Control area which brought us up short, an unexpected (but necessary) obstacle to our scampering. Fortunately, that document-checking and interrogation process flowed smoothly, and we then found clearer directions to our gate. Unfortunately, we didn’t know how far away it lay, and we were forced to race-walk again.  We arrived at the gate bushed, pissed, and sweating. A final shortcoming: The waiting area was small, and many of the passengers had to stand—not the reception you’re hoping for when you’ve just completed a sprint through a labyrinthine airport. It definitely should have been filmed for an episode of the reality television series, The Great Race.

Once we were on the plane and waiting to take off, the man sitting next to me leaned over and asked me, with a heavy accent: “Do you speak English?” I replied that I did, though I wondered why he was asking that on a plane bound for a German city.  He explained that he was concerned that he might be on the wrong plane. He showed me a boarding pass with the destination “Nürnberg” on it and another document that listed it as “Nuremberg.” I assured him he was on the right flight and that his uncertainty resulted from the different German and English spellings of the city. He was a Syrian traveling from Helsinki to visit his friend in Nuremberg. I asked him if he spoke Finnish. He shook his head. “German?” He shook his head again. Refugees and diaspora. I never saw what became of him after we left the plane.

On the way to Nuremberg, the KLM flight attendants brought us a small sweet treat, neatly packaged, that far surpassed the measly pretzel packet that American Airlines hands out during our Huntsville to Charlotte, NC flights to visit our relatives. (The cities are about the same distance apart.) When the flight attendant retrieved the empty box as we neared Nuremberg, I asked her if it would be recycled. “Of course, sir.” She smiled at me as she opened the seams of the box and added it to a neat stack.

After we left the airplane and entered the terminal of the Albrecht Dürer Airport, we quickly located the GCCL Program Director who had come to take us to the boat. He held a small flag, a traditional signal and rallying point for groups of tourists worldwide. He welcomed us and told us we would leave the airport after another batch of soon-arriving passengers got there.  Val, Marilyn, and I talked while we waited for the others. Because the airport was small and quiet, it almost felt like we were back in Huntsville. I found a newspaper, but it was Turkish. Val paid for my first bottle of German water.  I should have toasted her and marked the completion of the first part of our momentous journey.  

(To Be Continued)

Announcement created by Susan Simms.

As the committee works to inform our classmates of the upcoming reunion I am sure we will find some more classmates who are no longer with us. Susan Simms is doing a great job of tracking down the ones she can find.

Thanks goes out this week to Rainer Klauss, LHS '64, for his continued support of submitting stories for The Traveller. Remember any of you can send in stories about things going on in your lives that you might want to share with your classmates.

I want to once again suggest you add my email address (tommytowery@gmail.com) to your contact list in an effort to keep my emails to you being blocked as spam.

This Week's Questions, Answers, Comments

Richard ‘Rick’ Simmons, LHS ‘64, "Maryann and I plan to attend the reunion."

Gudrun Klauss, LHS ‘65, "Congratulations to the Reunion Committee and all of its members for coming up with a truly inspired plan for this year's reunion!"

Photographic Memories - Who Are They?

Each week I plan to share a group of photos from the 1960 "The General" yearbook without disclosing the names of the individuals. You may stop and try to identify them here, and when you are through you may scroll to the bottom of this page to see the identities of your classmates in the photos.

A Song to Set the Stage for Our Upcoming Reunion